Most certainly.
But we do not have to create good human beings, all of us are born good human beings, in fact we are all born with “all the qualities of head and heart”. Schools may not try to do better than God’s creation – children! Here is a sample of human values children most naturally display:
- Children at the tender age of 2 years have the ‘right sense of fairness’! It is amazing that children at that age are mostly fair and know if anyone is meted out any unfairness. We may not remember that the first time we heard ‘this is unfair’ were our own words but Sandeep remembers his daughter uttering the three-words at the age of 2!
- Children at the age of 3 have an almost instinctive ability to peg identities and expectations. They know the ‘difference’ (whatsoever) between ‘Mama’ (maternal uncle) and ‘Chacha’ (paternal uncle) or expectations from ‘just an Aunt’.
- Most children at the age of 3 know when their tummy and appetite are both satiated and will not have more, to avoid (the pain of) upsetting themselves.
- Children at the age of 4 have an almost uncanny adeptness in ‘measuring up’ people and respond accordingly and they are rarely wrong. In fact, they are rather very precise in the ‘summative’ assessments of people.
- Children at the age of 4 are copy-book negotiators! Do we need to elaborate this?
- Many children at the age of 4 already command a fairly pictorial frame of cleanliness, tidiness, ‘organisation of things’ and can expressly comment on the mess around them.
- Children, girls for sure, know ‘true love’ at the age of 8! Parents, especially fathers, can learn a few things about true love from their kid daughters.
- Children at the age of 12 can decide to stop eating ice cream, parathas, chocolates, sugar in milk and the likes (to manage weight).
The list is truly endless. We are born perfect. The best education is to retain and sharpen 99.9% of what we are born with!
The best education will retain or sharpen, at the age of 18, 99.9% of God’s gifts at the age of 5. It also means a million careers should remain viable options even after Class XII for every child.
Education in its essence should hone the born goodness in children with four axes of refinement – appropriate skills, attitudes, knowledge framework and the company of role model adults – to apply that goodness for personal and common good! Does it all sound like impossibility? It is definitely a tall order for our educational institutions but not impossible if parents become the primary educators and schools the secondary.
Sandeep’s daughter did receive an education of the sort described above; the aforementioned description emerged out of the first-hand experience of educating his daughter that way! Can other parents do it? Most educated parents certainly can do it, if they commit themselves to ensuring the best contemporary education for their children. It is unimaginable how technology is actually offering it all on a platter.
We live in unprecedented times – world is the stage for our children! Our children can leap several levels of success in their life time, there is nothing anchoring them down – not their race, colour, nationality, age, gender, indeed nothing. It is time we ensure the world’s best education for our children. The world’s best higher education, in fact, the best of bests higher education is also available for (almost) free – we can make our own bucket of courses from the best of professors from the best of universities!.
Abetter goal for schools is to focus on sharpening/retaining God’s gift of ‘multi-dimensional possibilities’ in student.
